If this is the way to superintelligence, it remains a bizarre one. “This is back to a million monkeys typing for a million years generating the works of Shakespeare,” Emily Bender told me. But OpenAI’s technology effectively crunches those years down to seconds. A company blog boasts that an o1 model scored better than most humans on a recent coding test that allowed participants to submit 50 possible solutions to each problem—but only when o1 was allowed 10,000 submissions instead. No human could come up with that many possibilities in a reasonable length of time, which is exactly the point. To OpenAI, unlimited time and resources are an advantage that its hardware-grounded models have over biology. Not even two weeks after the launch of the o1 preview, the start-up presented plans to build data centers that would each require the power generated by approximately five large nuclear reactors, enough for almost 3 million homes.
Infinite monkeys and infinite time is equally stupid, because obviously you can’t have either, for the simple reason that the universe is finite.
And apart from that, it’s stupid because if you use an infinite random, EVERYTHING is contained in it!
I’m sorry it just annoys the hell out of me, because it’s a thought experiment, and it’s stupid to use this as an analogy or example to describe anything in the real world.